All Text Images Audio Video. Advanced Search Help. Cite Export Share Print Email. Selected item. PDF format is widely accepted and good for printing. Plug-in required. PDF-1 View Usage Statistics. Staff View. Simple citation Kirk-Giannini, Cameron Domenico. Commitment, communication, and content: toward a theory of assertion. Click here for information about Citation Management Tools at Rutgers. Description Title Commitment, communication, and content: toward a theory of assertion.
Date Created Other Date degree. Subject Assertion , Philosophy. Extent 1 online resource viii, pages. Description According to a familiar and appealingly simple picture of assertion, the propositional content asserted by a speaker is both that which she communicates to members of her audience and that to which she undertakes a distinctive sort of commitment.
In what follows, I develop a criticism of this familiar picture and propose an alternative account according to which assertoric content is more intimately associated with commitment than communication. I begin by motivating a common claim about rational communication: that it cannot proceed when interlocutors are uncertain which contents utterances contribute to discourse. It emerges during my discussion of this claim that, given certain natural assumptions about the conditions under which it is rational for interlocutors to assert, it is possible to construct an argument from the premise that the propositional content asserted by a speaker is the information she communicates to members of her audience to the conclusion that speakers always assert diagonal propositions of their utterances β that is, propositions which characterize the information interlocutors can learn from their utterances by assuming that the propositions they semantically determine are true.
I proceed to argue that this latter claim, to which I refer as Diagonalism, systematically conflicts with our intuitive judgments about the conditions under which the contents of speakers' assertions would be true or false.
It follows that the failure of Diagonalism requires us to abandon the claim that the propositional content asserted by a speaker is the information she communicates to members of her audience.
